Sip of Water

I’ve just bid and paid for my first website. I mean, it’s not my *first* website ever but the first one I’ve bought from someone else. The idea of domain flipping intriques me so I figured if I came across a site, turnkey or not (which this one is), with a decent domain included for under $100, I would consider buying it. Last night I hymed and hawed before clicking the BIN button for a $99 site that I will look into promoting and what it would take to “flip” the site for a profit.

I, like many others I’m sure, let fear get in the way of moving forward. There was a goal setting workshop in one of the business/entrepreneur-related courses I took that had a handout showing how we always tend to stick within our comfort level and rarely step out of it. They were showing that it’s the stepping outside of this comfort level, often into an area that allows our fears and anxieties to elevate, that we should be setting goals because if we don’t, we never move ahead because we’re not challenged enough. It’s the stepping out of the comfort zone and into the unfamiliar that helps us as humans to move forward in our lives. This could be going for our first interviews or the new job itself, testing out some new theories on how to make money on the web, and of course anything that would involve spending time and/or money on something we’re unsure of.

I did that exact thing in the last 24 hours in buying this new website. I recall entering this industry with the fear of registering that first domain name, hosting account, and subsequent reseller account. The “whatifs” from my fears of being ripped off online, having my cc information stolen while making these purchases, or quite simply paying for a shitty product/service. Some of the fears I encountered from this auction stemmed mostly from this being the users second post. Will he rip me off? Is he here just phishing for account information? Am I wasting my money? I had chosen $100 or less because that to me is pocket change and worth taking the risk in hopes of someday being rewarded for doing so. The terms were to use PayPal and even in the event of getting ripped off the $99 for the website (apparently hard money to recover thru PayPal), I figured I don’t have much more then that in my account in case they somehow accessed it. I had to register over at NameCheap (I’m a GoDaddy guy) figuring again, this was quite safe to do.

Long story short, the domain was transferred to my NameCheap account within minutes of me sending my payment and was later followed up with the information required to get the files off of this persons server. I’m at work right now and they have the ports blocked required for CPanel/WHM so I’ll have to wait until I get home to setup the server space. In the meantime, I’ve FTPed the files to my desktop at work for safe keeping.